Friday, April 21, 2006

Book Recommendation

I picked up a much-loved book today and was reading the things I had underlined. The book is called Traces of Wisdom and it was written by Louise Stoltzfus. She was raised Amish but left her people, yet she had high regard for their lifestyle and tries to describe and explain it to those of us on the outside. I read online that she passed away a few years ago. I was saddened to hear that.

Here are a couple of things I read today:

"Why not celebrate domesticity? For it is indeed interwoven into the whole cloth of sane living. A home where people share in the regular work of the mundane will no doubt be cleaner and more comfortable. A home where we honor the commonplace as well as the extraordinary will bless us with levels of communion we cannot feel or experience in a similar celebration of escapism, of getting away from it all."

"Rest is, after all, an integral part of a resourceful life. A mind so tired it cannot think will not produce creative labor. A body so tired it cannot go on will not bring the hay into the barn. Rest restores the body and mind and rejuvenates the spirit and soul."

"To them [the Amish]pleasure is not about escape, it is about pleasantness and togetherness. Togetherness with God and friends and family. My people do not imagine pleasure to be synonymous with escape. Honest pleasure touches a place much deeper in the soul, where the spirit finds peace and hope is revived, where the body finds rest and life is sustained."

One more..and one of my favorites...

"The mundane tasks of being a homemaker--making beds, cleaning bathrooms, and dusting furniture--bring a seamless steadiness to their surroundings that moderates the high passion of imagination and invention...................They exercise their gifts as they have time and opportunity [stitching, quilting, cooking, etc], but they rarely put creative work ahead of the mundane tasks of every day. Instead, they appreciate the sanity and singlemindedness that these chores lend their lives."

I think she has a beautiful but simple way of putting things and a way of finding the holiness in the mundane, for which I am grateful.